July 15, 2008

Cholesterol Pills for Kids?

Recently, there was an outcry about new recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics that suggest giving kids as young as 8 years old cholesterol-reducing statin drugs.

Tara Parker-Pope discusses the controversy in a recent column. Those who object to the new recommendations worry about the drugs' long-term consequences, the AAP's financial relationships with drug companies and the possibility that the new guidelines will lead to overuse of the drugs. The defenders argue that the guidelines specify that only a very small group of children--those with strong genetic and lifestyle risk factors--would even be considered for statin therapy. Parker-Pope's whole article is worth reading, as it discusses both the financial and the medical aspects to this debate.

One problem here is widespread throughout medicine: what some have called "indication sprawl." Once a drug or treatment is recommended for one narrow category of patients, it tends to get indicated for more and more categories with less and less testing and justification for the new categories. But more profit for the drug makers.

June 26, 2008

Parents File Suit Over BPA Bottles

This blog has previously discussed the dangers of bisphenol A (called BPA), a common ingredient in the plastics used to make baby bottles, for fetuses, babies and small children. The intended effect of BPA is to make the bottle shatterproof, which it does, but now evidence of its side-effects are coming to light.

Now four Ohio parents are filing a class-action suit against five baby-bottle manufacturers, alleging that the manufacturers knew about the dangers of BPA but continued to use it in their bottles anyway.

From the article:

The parents, all from Franklin County, sued Avent America of Bensenville, Ill.; Handi-Craft Co. of St. Louis, also known as Dr. Brown's; Evenflo Co. of Vandalia; Gerber Products Co. of Parsippany, N.J.; and Playtex Products of Westport, Conn., on behalf of themselves and others who bought the products.